Friedrich Hayek

Friedrich August Von Hayek (1899-1992) was a Nobel Prize winning economist and one of the most prominent members of the Austrian School of Economics, a libertarian economic theory. Hayek emphasized our limited knowledge of the markets (and other subjects), and thus our need for the price mechanism to communicate essential information about supply and demand. His theories are that no centralized planner or government can manage the economy and that the free market is the most efficient known allocator of resources.

Although Hayek was a self-proclaimed agnostic—which helps explain why was allowed to win a Nobel Prize—analysis has shown that "his treatment of individual liberty was more consistent
with a Judeo-Christian worldview than with that of his naturalist peers and
postmodernist successors."[1]

Contents

Life

Hayek was born in Vienna, which was then the capital of Austria-Hungary. As a teenager he studied biology, philosophy and ethics, before joining the Austrian Army aged 18 and becoming one of the pioneers of airborne artillery observation during World War 1. After the war he earned doctorates in law and political science. He moved to London in 1931 to be a professor at the London School of Economics. When Austria became part of Nazi Germany following the 1938 Anschluss Hayek refused to return there, and became a British subject.

Hayek was one of the most vocal and respected contemporary critics of the liberal and now widely discredited economist John Maynard Keynes.

Hayek has been compared to the philosopher David Hume with respect to his insistence that we should be "sensible of our ignorance."

Contributions

The Road to Serfdom

His most famous popular book is The Road To Serfdom (1944). Where in he discusses the collapse of essential freedoms in the face of economic manipulation at the hands of well meaning government actors. His most influential work among economists however is his 1935 academic papers "The Nature and History of the Problem" and "The Present State of the Debate," on the total inability of socialism to coordinate and allocate resources due to their lack of price signals, an effect that lead to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. Many of these ideas were developed in conjunction with his friend and mentor Ludwig von Mises.[2]

Criticism of Social Justice, Mill

Yet Mill appears to have been wholly unaware of the circumstance that in this meaning it refers to situations entirely different from those to which the four other meanings apply, or that this conception of 'social justice' leads straight to full-fledged socialism.[4]

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Quotes

"Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom."

"'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded."

"The more the state "plans" the more difficult planning becomes for the individual."

"Justice is an attribute of individual action. I can be just or unjust towards my fellow man. But the conception of a social justice, to expect from an impersonal process which nobody can control, to bring about a just result, is not only a meaningless conception, it's completely impossible. See everybody talks about social justice but if you press people to explain to you what they mean by social justice, nobody knows. I am telling you because I've been trying for the past 20 years, asking people, what really are your principles of social justice?"[5]

Bibliography

Birner, Hack, and Rudy van Zijp, eds., Hayek: Co-ordination and Evolution: His legacy in philosophy, politics, economics and the history of ideas (1994)